27 replies to this topic

[acheronlv426]

My contract for DSL is up and I have an opportunity to get a new broadband connection. Any ideas as to which would be better for MWO? DSL or cable? Are there other alternatives I've missed?

[Barbaric Soul]

fastest connection with the lowest ping is always the best

[Vernius Ix]

DSL.

[Vulpesveritas]

Depends on the provider. Most cable providers throttle their internet, which isn't good for gaming. Some DSL providers do the same. It all comes down to what bandwidth you can get / $$$. If you're in the USA, see if you can get Verizon FIOS or Centurylink/qwest DSL. They'll be your best bets if you can get them in your area by what I've seen. Broadband-wise, Sprint and T-mobile are the only good 4g options, while you'll lose 4g speeds after a while with T-mobile you get unlimited 3g after, and sprint has pure unlimited 4g, then you have the 3g options of virgin mobile and boost mobile broadband-wise. But you want actual unlimited internet- a lot of broadband providers are reducing customers to data limits which aren't that good of an idea if you're gaming and downloading a good number of files.

But in all honesty, it comes down to what internet providers are in your area.

[acheronlv426]

My options appear to be Charter Cable, Centurylink DSL, and some local wireless thing. We're pretty limited up here at the top of Wisconsin, USA. I guess I have to see what speeds come at what price. Through Speedtest.net I have a ping of 97ms, a download speed of 0.75Mbps, and an upload speed of 0.26Mbps. I know I can get a bit faster, but I don't know how much yet. Obviously faster would be better, but does anyone think those numbers would work with the game?

[Vulpesveritas]

acheronlv426, on 13 March 2012 - 09:40 AM, said:

My options appear to be Charter Cable, Centurylink DSL, and some local wireless thing. We're pretty limited up here at the top of Wisconsin, USA. I guess I have to see what speeds come at what price. Through Speedtest.net I have a ping of 97ms, a download speed of 0.75Mbps, and an upload speed of 0.26Mbps. I know I can get a bit faster, but I don't know how much yet. Obviously faster would be better, but does anyone think those numbers would work with the game?

umm... let's put it this way. 3g broadband is faster.
But of your options I highly recommend Centurylink, they have great value and by the gods they don't throttle your internet despite having decent speeds. Whereas charter does like to throttle.

So I would say go centurylink.

[Vernius Ix]

Centurylink DSL. I am using them now and they are blazing fast. The best net pipe I have ever had.

[Vulpesveritas]

Vernius Ix, on 13 March 2012 - 11:36 AM, said:

Centurylink DSL. I am using them now and they are blazing fast. The best net pipe I have ever had.

I wish I still had them. Sadly they aren't available here. I remember when the used to be called Qwest.

[Vernius Ix]

Vulpesveritas, on 13 March 2012 - 11:51 AM, said:

I wish I still had them. Sadly they aren't available here. I remember when the used to be called Qwest.

Yeah I am getting ready to move, and the place I am going only has wireless net service. I am going to be very sad to loose centurylink

[Vulpesveritas]

Vernius Ix, on 13 March 2012 - 11:57 AM, said:

Yeah I am getting ready to move, and the place I am going only has wireless net service. I am going to be very sad to loose centurylink

Dang. You going T-mobile, sprint or satellite?

[Vernius Ix]

Vulpesveritas, on 13 March 2012 - 12:06 PM, said:

Dang. You going T-mobile, sprint or satellite?

Its a local company. Called MountainWave. Its true highspeed. Think of it as wireless dsl.

[HeroicTofu]

I used to use CenturyLink DSL but switched to *** Communications Cable after having several strange issues with the DSL. I contacted tech support about 10+ times but they could never narrow down the issue. The issue being, that intermittently throughout the day, the connection would just -drop- for no apparent reason for about 30 seconds and then come back up again. It doesn't sound like much, but if you're in the middle of taking a test online for college and then the connection suddenly dies and times you out of the exam. Yeah. It's not good. The DSL never used to do that at all, it just started happening kinda thing.

Anyway, *** Communications Cable has been wonderful for me, no limits whatsoever, I get approx. 22.0 Download on Speedtest.net on any given day and certain games just work better for whatever reason. That's my 2 cents.

The censor is censoring the name of the company, so in the interests of people knowing what I'm talking about, I will bypass the censor in this occasion. C 0 X. Thank you.

Edited by HeroicTofu, 13 March 2012 - 07:02 PM.

[acheronlv426]

Just thought of something, my house is almost 100 years old, and the wiring is not much newer, would it help to run new phone lines in the house?

[Vulpesveritas]

acheronlv426, on 16 March 2012 - 05:48 PM, said:

Just thought of something, my house is almost 100 years old, and the wiring is not much newer, would it help to run new phone lines in the house?

quite possibly since you're running DSL.

[LordDeathStrike]

im limited to a 4meg dsl line, but its non throttled and pings good except to australia and asia (northdakota canadian border north of rugby)

theyre working on upgrading the copper to fiber so in a few more years we might get civilized speeds.

[guardiandashi]

if you are in an old ~100year old+ house and have the opportunity to upgrade /replace the communications wiring I would strongly suggest considering it.

with that age of wires you are going to have a number of potentual issues.

1 it might be effectively untwisted wire which is a lot more prone to "crosstalk" this is where the signals migrate from 1 wire to another
2 the insulation on the wiring might be garbage by modern standards making it a lot more prone to decay which leads to shorts
3 even if your telephone wires are decient quality it can be worth it to replace the wiring with cat5 or cat5E this is common cabling used for ethernet networks. (specifically 10/100 ethernet) with the capability to work over short distances as gigabit capable wiring (short distances in this case being up to ~100 meters) which is typically further than you will find in most houses.

http://www.pcworld.c...r_ethernet.html

that article gives some good general tips to consider

and I agree with the authors suggestion of if you are going to open up the walls to do the work of replacing wire IMO it makes sense to "overbuild" IE if you figure 1 phone cable and 1 data cable is all you "need"... on a project like this why not pull extra cables while you are at it.

if you run all cat5 or cat5e cabling each run as a network cable is 1 connection, however 1 cat5 cable can handle up to 4 telephone connections or the equivalant (typical telephone uses only 2 wires standard telephone wiring is 2 pair for a and b phone lines) or in other words using cat5 1 cable pull would be a1 and b1 plus a2 and b2.

[acheronlv426]

Well, took the jump to higher speed DSL, they had to run new lines to the house and after getting a new modem I'm downloading at almost 6 meg per speedtest.net. I can't get 10 because I'm too far away from the switch. My upload is only .75 meg but I'm hoping that is normal?

[Requital]

one thing to note, often a stable connection can be better than a faster less reliable connection.

When I first started playing MW4 I had a rock solid 56k connection. speed was at 43k all the time. My ping was not great, but it stayed steady, and I played quite well in spite of dial up. The connection problems came when I switched to comcast cable...1.5mb, but my ping bounced all over the place and connection speed was never steady...it was often 1mb, but sometimes would dip below the 40k I had "upgraded" from.

Learn about the local ISP's, often service is different in each region, a provider that sucks in the midwest might be great on the east coast.

[Vulpesveritas]

acheronlv426, on 09 April 2012 - 07:41 PM, said:

Well, took the jump to higher speed DSL, they had to run new lines to the house and after getting a new modem I'm downloading at almost 6 meg per speedtest.net. I can't get 10 because I'm too far away from the switch. My upload is only .75 meg but I'm hoping that is normal?

Upload speeds are for the most part always going to be lower than download speeds.

[Catamount]

Well bandwidth isn't very important anyways. Contrary to popular belief, most games are honestly very frugal with badwidth (they have to be, for the poor server's sake as much as anything), and don't use more than a dozen or two KB/s, still enough to overload a dialup connection by several fold, but that's not saying much.

What does matter is latency.

After 150-200kbps, bandwidth is extraneous, but there is a BIG difference between having a 50ms ping to a server, and a 200ms ping. It's the difference between effectively instananeous action, and having a 1/5 second delay in everything you do and see. I have an amazingly good connection for gaming. The bandwidth is a modest 4Mbps, or about 512KBps, but it's a fiber optic connection with very low latency, so I get 40-50ms often on gaming servers.